Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story

by Leigh Byrne

  “Believe me, nobody wants to get off your property more than me,” I assured him. “But we have to convince Chad to leave.”

  “Where’s he at? I’ll convince him!” He held the gun high in the air for emphasis.

  “He’s still at work, but he’ll be home in about an hour and a half.”

  “I’ll wait for him,” he said, putting the gun back to my head.

  “Why don’t you sit on the sofa and wait?” I suggested. “I’ll sit beside you so you can keep the gun to my head.”

  My offer seemed to confuse him. “What?”

  “Why don’t we sit down?”

  “Sit at the table,” he ordered, proving he was back in control.

  I sat and so did he, laying the gun on the table in front of him. “You know I can get to this real quick if I have to,” he said, patting the handle of the gun.

  “Oh yeah, I know. I’ve seen you do it before.”

  He grabbed his Camels from the front pocket of his shirt and lit up.

  I slid an ashtray over to him. “Want a beer?”

  He looked confused again. He wasn’t used to people helping him get drunker. “I’ll get one if I want it.” After several cheek-caving drags from his cigarette, he asked, “Who gave you permission to live here on my property anyway?”

  “Chad gave me permission, but I’m not sure who gave him permission.”

  “Well I can tell you it wasn’t me.”

  “I’m really sorry, Big Chad. We’ll have to do something about that. Like I said, Chad will be home soon and we’ll get everything straightened out then.”

  “Big Chad got up, waddled over to the refrigerator and pulled out a Pabst Blue Ribbon like he knew exactly where it was.”

  “Grab me one too, would you?” He cut his eyes over to me and studied my face for a minute, and then got another beer from the refrigerator and sat it on the table.

  We sipped our beers and he smoked a few more cigarettes while another half-hour passed. He had to go to the bathroom. He picked up his gun and took it with him.

  When he came out of the bathroom, I asked, “Why don’t we play cards until Chad gets home?” He loved to play cards and I knew he couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

  We played Black Jack for an hour and he won every hand. I made sure of it. Finally Chad walked in. He looked stunned at the sight of me and his dad sitting at the table drinking and playing cards. “Dad, what are you doing here?” he asked.

  Big Chad hesitated, as if he had forgotten why he’d come. I jumped in and helped him out. “Big Chad came to ask you who gave us permission to live here.”

  “You did, Dad. You gave me permission. Don’t you remember?”

  “Hell no, I don’t remember! I’d know if I let a chink live on my property.”

  We’re back to the chink thing again. Funny how he never thought I was a chink. Guess it was because I was blond.

  Big Chad picked up his gun from the table and aimed it at Chad. “I want you to move out today! I’ve got to go somewhere right now, but when I get back you both better be gone!” He chugged the rest of his beer and headed out the front door.

  After Big Chad had left, Chad asked, “What was that all about?”

  “What do you mean, what’s it about? Your dad’s on a drunk and talking nonsense again. What’s new?”

  For me, Big Chad getting drunk and coming up to the trailer was a good thing, because I knew I could use the incident to try to get Chad to move. I was fed up with Bobbi watching everything I did, and Chad spending all his time at their house. He’d promised me that living behind his parents was only temporary—a year at best. Over a year and a half had passed and he hadn’t even mentioned moving.

  “Chad, he held a gun to my head!” I said, trying to infuse fear into my voice. “What if Molly had been awake? Do you want to risk her getting shot? Do you want her to see her Papaw that way? We’ve got to get away from here!”

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “We’ll start looking for another place to live this weekend.”

  A PRETEND KIND OF HAPPY

  Chad and I were having trouble finding a house priced within our budget. He wanted to give up the hunt, buy some land in the country and live in the trailer until we could afford to build. But he couldn’t find a spot to suit him—meaning he couldn’t find anything near his mom and dad. I breathed a sigh of relief when he couldn’t find any land. Not only did I want to get away from Big Chad and Bobbi, I wanted to get away from the trailer too. I hated its thin paneled walls and foam ceilings, how every time a big storm came I could hear it popping and creaking, and feel it swaying in the wind.

  It took a few months, but Chad finally did sell the trailer to his friend, Harry, and we bought a tiny frame house in a subdivision on the outskirt of Sullivan. As soon as I saw the house, I knew it was going to be ours. I pictured Chad grilling burgers out in the yard while Molly played with the neighborhood kids. Of course Molly would have to make some friends, and we would have to buy a grill, but those were minor details.

  The new house had only a tad more room inside than the trailer, but the place was sturdy, in decent shape and within our budget. Chad hated the idea of living in a subdivision. “Everybody’s on top of each other here,” he complained. “You can reach out the window and shake hands with your neighbors while they’re sitting in their living room.” He promised that as soon as some land he liked became available we were going to start building. I prayed that would never happen.

  The house was tight, but at least it had a concrete foundation and a real roof. And there was a neighborhood, a neighborhood with a quiet street on which I could take walks and push Molly in her stroller. But the best part was there would be no meddling, controlling Bobbi around, or little Big Chad wielding his gun.

  After a while, Chad came around and began sharing my enthusiasm for the new house. Together we painted the living room and kitchen walls a cheerful sunshine yellow to match the gold carpet and white linoleum floors. Each of the three bedrooms had a different color of shag carpet: hunter green, royal blue, and deep crimson. We bought wallpaper on clearance to coordinate with each bedroom: trees for the green one, cloudy skies for the blue, and for our room, we chose a red and cream velvet fleur de lei pattern. By the time we’d hung red sheers on the windows, put up our yard sale brass bed, and decorated with peacock feathers and a lava lamp, our bedroom looked like a brothel. At the time, I thought it was stunning, especially in the early morning when the sun shone through the sheers bathing my skin in a flattering pink light.

  Molly, now nine months old, was crawling and pulling up, and getting into everything. She could say Mama, Daddy, birdie, no, baba for bottle, and, ta-ta, which was what she called her security blanket. She was such a good baby, and a daddy’s girl. Her face lit up every time she had him in her sight. And she was so beautiful. She looked like a china doll with her dark, almost black hair, rosy cheeks, and deep hazel eyes. All—well most—parents think their children are beautiful, but ours really was. We had people stop us on the streets to tell us so.

  One of my younger brothers, Jimmy D. had recently graduated from high school and had moved into an apartment in Uniontown, a few miles away from where Chad and I lived. He’d always liked the area when we were kids and had made many friends there during his teenage years. Shortly after he moved there, he looked us up and started visiting the house, and slowly, we got to know each other again and established an on the surface friendship.

  Whenever I tried to bring up our past, Jimmy D., like Mama, didn’t want to discuss it. He was careful not to mention her during our conversations. The few times her name did slip through his lips, his face went pale, like a snake had been released into the room. I knew better than to say anything bad about her to him, or to suggest he should condemn her for what she’d done to me. How could I expect him to turn against her when she’d been so good to him?

  Once, late at night, after a few beers, I cajoled him in to talking. He acknowledged, in a general w
ay, that Mama didn’t treat me the same as her other children, but the minute I tried to expand on the subject, he became defensive as if he thought I was blaming him for not doing something to save me. I wasn’t. If I couldn’t help myself, how could I have expected him to help me?

  As we were talking, I was taken back to a time when he was eight and I was around ten. Mama had created a contest between him and my other two brothers to see which one of them could hit me in the stomach the hardest. To appease her, he had cocked his arm and pretended he was going to hit me hard, but then right as the punch met my stomach, he held back. I had never forgotten his brave act of kindness, only a child himself.

  I wondered if in the ten years since, he’d ever thought of that day, or any of our shared incidents of abuse. I wondered if, looking back through the eyes of an adult, his perception was skewed. If he found it difficult to recreate how he felt then—the terror, the sense of helplessness—because to acknowledge the feelings he’d had as a boy, might make him seem weak as a man.

  The last thing I wanted from Jimmy D. was guilt, or an apology, or for us to relive the details of the depressing history we’d shared. I only wanted him to admit the atrocities I endured—the atrocities we both endured. You begin to think you’re crazy when everyone around you pretends something never happened when you know damn well it did. Makes you think you’re viewing life through a dirty window. You question yourself—your memory, your sanity. Did it actually happen?

  There were many things I wanted to say to Jimmy D., but whenever he displayed reticence, I retreated out of fear of running him off, of losing him altogether. Because I wanted to keep him—the only semblance of a sibling I had—in my life, I chose to move forward with our relationship as if our past did not exist. What I had with Jimmy D. wasn’t much, but it was something, something that made me feel closer to normal. More than what I had before he moved back to Kentucky. Before he came along, things had been lopsided with Chad’s huge extended family—albeit dysfunctional—to share with Molly, and no one but Aunt Macy to represent my side. Molly loved Jimmy D.’s funny, lighthearted ways, and he was good with her. He and Chad got along too. They had a few guy’s nights out, drinking beer and shooting pool.

  Things were better than they’d ever been for me. I had a husband, a daughter, a house, and now I had a brother. Chad had cut back on his drinking, and the only time he partied was when he occasionally went out to a bar with his sisters or Jimmy D. He never wanted me to go to the bars with them; I was the one left at home to babysit all the kids. On the outside, I wore a serene smile, but below the surface, I harbored a troubling secret: trapped under Chad’s protective net disguised as love, I had become a prisoner, like I’d been as a child, and I dreamt of the day I would break free.

  On a gorgeous morning in early summer, I decided to take Molly down to the local Kwik Pik for a Popsicle. I dressed her in her cutest sun-suit and strapped her in her car seat. As I started the car engine, I noticed I felt awkward behind the wheel, almost as if I were driving for the very first time. Figuring it was because I hadn’t been out in a while, I ignored the strange feeling and shifted into reverse.

  Backing out of the driveway, my pulse quickened and my chest began to get tight. I put the car in park again to collect myself. For a minute or two, I sat there in a cold sweat, not sure what to do next. Maybe I’m coming down with something, I thought. I decided to skip the Popsicles and go back into the house.

  I shut off the engine and turned to unstrap Molly from her car seat. She smiled at me with all four teeth visible, excited to be going somewhere. When I started to get her out, she began to cry. I’d already told her we were going to get a Popsicle and she was looking forward to it. I didn’t have the heart to let her down. I squared up with the steering wheel again. How difficult can this be? The Kwik Pik was less than five miles away. I can do this. I backed the rest of the way out of the driveway, both clammy hands glued to the wheel at ten and two.

  Once we got going, the other cars appeared to me as if they were driving too close to mine, causing me to swerve off the road. All at once, everything around me—buildings and houses I’d seen hundreds of times before—looked unfamiliar. There was no way I could have been lost. I knew the Kwik Pik was a short, straight shot on the highway from our house, but it seemed like I’d been driving forever. Did I turn the wrong way coming out of the subdivision?

  Resisting the urge to turn the car around, I drove a little farther down the road, until I spotted the familiar red and white Kwik Pik sign. I’d never in my life been so glad to see a convenient store. Carrying Molly on one hip, I went inside and browsed around. When I had been in there so long the clerk began to eye me suspiciously, I paid for our Popsicles and took them out to the car to eat.

  After we finished, we sat in the parking lot for almost an hour watching the traffic go by. I was stalling because I was afraid to drive back home. Molly was hot and was beginning to get fussy. She was sticky from the Popsicle and her diaper needed to be changed. Chad would be off work soon. We had to go home.

  Clenching the steering wheel in a death grip, I started the car and pulled out, my heart drumming in my ears. When we got home, I grabbed Molly and ran inside the house. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I decided not to tell anyone.

  A day or two later, Chad went squirrel hunting on some rural land out by his parents’ house. I refused to eat squirrel meat, but Bobbi liked it, so he always dropped off whatever he shot with her.

  As soon as he walked in the door from hunting, he asked me what I was doing at the Kwik Pik a few days earlier.

  “How did you know I was at the Kwik Pik?”

  “Mom told me. She said somebody she knew saw you there sitting in the parking lot.”

  “I can’t believe this town is so frickin’ small that I can’t even go to the Kwik Pik without Bobbi knowing about it.”

  “What I want to know is why you didn’t tell me you went!”

  “Tell you I went to get a Popsicle for Molly? I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think it was important!”

  “We’re married; we’re supposed to tell each other everything!”

  “It’s the Kwik Pik for heaven sake!” I was waving my hands and my voice was squeaky. I sounded guilty. “Why did Bobbi tell you I was there, anyway? And why did whoever told her think to mention it?” I leaned in. “What, do you have people watching me now?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Oh my god! I’m surrounded by nuts! And your mom and her friends are a bunch of no-life hicks!”

  “You’re awfully defensive for somebody who just went out to get a Popsicle!”

  “This is ridiculous!” I went into the kitchen to finish making dinner.

  He followed me. “I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. My wife sitting in the Kwik Pik parking lot for hours like some whore trying to pick up a john!”

  Chad started drinking, and we stayed up all night saying the same things over and over, getting nowhere. It was exhausting.

  He and I had begun to argue a lot lately. We didn’t fight physically like we had when we first got together—having a child in the house had changed that—but our shouting matches were over the top, and often caused Molly to cry. All the screaming and threats took me back to a place where I didn’t want to be. And when Chad pushed me too far, my own pent up rage sometimes gurgled to the surface. To keep the wild animal inside of me tame, I got to where I would do almost anything to avoid a fight, which meant letting Chad have his way.

  After the Kwik Pik issue, I stayed home and played the good wife, the good mother. Going to the convenient store wasn’t worth fighting over. I was too scared to drive anyway. I even broke over and started going with Chad to his parents’ house again. Not much had changed there during my brief boycott: Big Chad ignored me as usual, and his sisters tolerated me because they had to. But for some reason—probably guilt—Bobbi was nice to me. She even offered to give me a home perm, for which she claimed to be famous. I w
as leery of the idea, but felt obligated to accept her peace offering.

  Bobbi got out a shoe box of well-used pink curlers and rolled my hair so tightly my eyebrows took on a sinister upward slant. When she’d finished with me, my hair was frizzy and had turned from dirty blond to a pale orangey color. But it didn’t matter; I wasn’t planning on getting out of the house much anyway.

  Chad had me where he wanted me: at home with a child, my only adult contact being him and his family. Still I was convinced he loved me, and that his controlling behavior was born of his determination to hold together the family he’d created. I wasn’t sure exactly what, from his dysfunctional upbringing, had caused him to have such deep-seeded insecurities. He was no doubt, like me, concealing ghosts from his past even more disturbing than the ones I’d already seen. Chad and I had both been damaged by our disturbed parents, and the damage had perpetuated our own familial dysfunction. Even if we could somehow repair what our parents had done to us, it would surely not be a quick fix—or an easy one.

  POSSIBILITIES

  Molly and I were out in the backyard one afternoon when I heard a sunny female voice coming from around the side of the house. “Hello?”

  Turning in the direction of the voice, I saw a young woman leaning over the top of the chain-link fence, holding a baby boy who appeared to be around Molly’s age. I recognized the woman as one of the neighbors who lived across the street. Once while walking, I’d passed her house when she was out in her yard watering flowers, and she had smiled and waved at me in a friendly, neighborly way.

  “Hi,” I said to her.

  She smiled. “Mind if we come around back?”

  “No, not at all; the gate’s unlocked.”

  As they approached us, recalling how pretty this woman was, I regretted not having put on make-up, and also for agreeing to let Bobbi give me a home perm.